One More Chance
by TeyrianTimelord
Summary: Cougar and Maria have been captured and are being tortured for intel on the losers. It's up to Jensen and the rest of the team to save them from Unit 16 and its horrors. SEQUEL to "One More Shot" NONSLASH CougarxOC one-shot.T for violence,torture
1. Chapter 1

**Yeah! It's part 3 of my Losers Chronicles, finally alive! Has the suspense been killing anyone? So here's the boring stuff we always have to go through: I do not own Clay, Aisha, Jensen, Pooch, Jolene, Max, Roque, or Cougar. I do reserve the copyrights to Maria, Alé, Marcos, and Jackie. Non-Slash. CougarxOC. Movieverse with a lot of plot twists. Enjoy, mis amigos! **

One More Chance

_Previously in "One More Shot"…_

"_How bad is it?"Maria asked from across the porch where Aisha was wrapping up her arm. _

"_Not good," Jensen replied. "The wounds themselves are nasty, but the shots missed the vital areas. The heavy bleeding is the problem."_

_a) Cougar would make it in and out of the hospital safely or b) the local officers had taken the time to read the FBI's most wanted list._

"_Maria Valencia you are under arrest for the murder of Charles Parker, aiding and abetting on six charges, assault, battery, evading arrest, theft, conspiracy, and driving an uninsured vehicle."_

"_You, all of you," Jensen replied with all the courage he could muster. "Cougar could be dying. Maria could be dead. We need to rescue them_ _now!_"

"_Some call this place Hell. Others call it The Dragon's Pit. But to the military world, it's simply Unit 16."_

"_It's where they take war criminals to die. And we're next in line."_

_**The Losers**_

"This is all your fault!" Jensen yelled, jabbing a finger at Clay's chest. "Cougar and Maria are gone because of you! Why did you have to give the medics their real names?"

Pooch stood behind Jensen supportively. "Clay, we were finally in a good set up, on our way to exposing Max! Now it's not just the team that they're searching for, but our families too!"

"Hey! They wouldn't let us in or out without valid names," Aisha threw back. "I can't just hand them a thousand dollars and walk away. Besides, Clay wasn't the only one giving out info."

"Don't try to pass the blame off to Maria!" Jensen yelled, ready to break someone's nose.

The unit had been stuck in the single-bed motel room for five hours now, and so far, all they had accomplished was obtaining ridiculously skull-splitting migraines. If they could take three minutes to stop screaming at each other, George would begin to cry, or the flashing police lights would force them into a full lock-down: closed window shades, switched off lights, and complete silence. Jensen felt himself balancing on the edge of insanity against a brick wall of anxiety. To say the whole night had been counterproductive would be an unjustifiable understatement.

"Please, this isn't getting us anywhere," Jolene said from her spot on the bed where she was gently rocking George back and forth in an attempt to calm him from everyone else's squabble.

"She's right," Pooch added. "We need to stop pointing fingers and make a game plan. If not, Cougar and Maria are good as dead."

Despite the burning fury toward Clay that devoured his gut, Jensen inhaled deeply. As much as he would like it, establishing a blame would not fix the problem. The team would have to do what they always do: kick down the door guns blazing and kick some bad-guy ass. With some sort of a strategy, of course.

After a few moments of silence, Aisha exhaled loudly.

"So where do we start? We don't even know where they are."

"I think I do," Roque said.

All eyes suddenly turned to him. After faking his own death, _really _stealing Max's $400 million, and returning back to the team with it, no one really trusted him, but Clay had decided that it wasn't safe to let him go back to wherever he had been. Was he seriously now the one man Cougar and Maria's lives depended on? Pooch, Clay, Jensen, and Aisha exchanged concerned looks. Acting on his word alone could get them all killed. But it was the only lead they had.

"Spill it," Clay ordered.

Roque nodded in acknowledgement.

"Unit 16."

"What the hell is 'Unit 16?'" Pooch asked suspiciously.

"It technically doesn't exist. If it did, the United States government would have to shut it down for 'cruel and unusual punishment.'"

"You mean torture?" Jolene gasped, covering George's ears.

Roque nodded solemnly.

"Picture Alcatraz mixed with Guantanamo and amp it by thirty. Every personal protection clause in the Constitution is over ruled. No jury trial, no right to a lawyer, none of that stuff. Human rights activists' worst nightmare come to life is in Unit 16. Usually the FBI and CIA reserve it for international terrorists responsible for genocide. It's where Germany would have sent Himmler at the end of World War II if it was open."

"Where's it located?" Pooch asked, already positioning a pistol in his holster and shoving Mojito in his pocket.

"It's an underground base hidden a mile under the Appalachians. The entrance is said to be impossible to find."

_And our friends are in there _Jensen thought. _How in hell or on earth are we going to pull this off?_

"What are we waiting for?" Jensen said as optimistically as he could. _Never mind the fact that we're walking in to yet another deathtrap. _

Pooch looked over his shoulder to Jolene. Her brown eyes were filled with tears. Her husband had already died once. They knew it would be cruel to ask her to let him die again. Pooch sat down next her and draped an arm around her shoulder and George. The rest of the team pretended tried not to stare. The family needed a moment. Jensen regretted not having the power to let them have one alone.

"You need to go," Jolene said, choking on tears. "Cougar and Maria need you. All of you."

Jensen closed his eye and tried to down out everything that the two said. It wasn't his place to listen. Then his own family came to his mind. His sister and her daughter…

"_Uncle Jake! Uncle Jake!" Ally exclaimed, running into the living room where he was sitting at his laptop. "Uncle Jaaaaaaake!"_

_Jensen closed the top of the computer and put it on the coffee table. _

"_What is it, Al?"he asked. The seven year old collapsed into her uncle's lap._

"_Mommy fell asleep again."_

_Jensen sighed. It was three in the afternoon. He knew that Madison hadn't fallen asleep, but that's what the siblings had agreed to tell the little girl. They both knew from painful experience that unstable parents were not the best thing for a growing child._

"_Okay, sweetie," he said, standing up. "Why don't you go get yourself a cookie and I'll go wake up mommy?"_

"_Thank you, Uncle Jake!" Ally giggled and ran into the kitchen. _

_Jensen ran a hand through his hair as he walked into his sister's office. As he expected, a small needle was still sticking halfway out of her arm. Her long blonde hair was fallen in a greasy curtain obscuring her face from view. This was the second third time this month Ally had found her mother passed out cold in the middle of what should have been bringing home money to feed her family. Jensen had moved in three years ago at Madison's request after her husband up and left without warning. Well, except for the scar on her back._

"_Madison!" Jensen whispered harshly, "Madison Lucinda Jensen you wake up right now!"_

_Madison moaned and rolled a bit to the side. Jensen shook her more until she had no choice but to get up enough to push him away. She looked absolutely awful. Fingers of red veined the whites of her eyes, under which wet mascara seeped down her cheek, almost meeting the thin stream of saliva at the corner of her mouth, giving Madison the appearance of the first to die in a horror movie. _

"_What do you want?" she growled, ripping the needle out of her skin. _

_Jensen crossed his arms._

"_She found you. Again."_

_Madison's furious demeanor unwound to a pitiful despair as she sank back into her seat._

"_My beautiful little girl…" she murmured. "Why was she of all people in the world cursed to be such an angel? Such an angel while I sit here and stick myself with this shit!" She tossed the needle over her shoulder with disgust, then sighed. "You know I try, Jake, you know I do."_

_Jensen lightly patted her shoulder._

"_I do know, Maddy. For the most part you've done a great job. Ally is a happy girl. She's the star of her soccer team, she can bake a mean batch of chocolate chunk cookies, and she has a beautiful smile. You just need to stop the drugs."_

"_You helped make her that way," Madison whispered gratefully, affectionately grasping her brother's arm. "I feel like I'm doing the best I can. We never had someone around to be a mother model…" _

"_You know that and I know that, but Ally doesn't need to know that."_

_Plastering on a fake smile, Jensen pulled Madison to her feet._

"_Come on, girly. Let's get you to a shower and a nice cup of tea. Then I am going through all of your drawers and throwing out any drug paraphernalia I find."_

"Jensen! You in there, bro?"

Jensen shook his head, coming back to the present. He must have spaced out for a while, because the rest of the team was already packing things up for the trip, loading magazines and stuffing cliff bars into backpacks. It would be a five hour trip down to the heart of the Appalachians in West Virginia, but everyone else seemed ready to go and waiting on him.

"You okay?" Clay asked uncharacteristically. "If you can get off the mother ship, we're ready to take off."

"Well don't wait for me!" Jensen laughed, trying to sell an enthusiastic attitude as best he could.

Pooch nodded.

"Alright then. I'll drive."

_**The Losers**_

Maria held her breath and tried to drown out all the noise around her by repeating the mantra through her head over and over again. _It's just water. It's just water. It's just water. It's just water._

And then it came. A rush of arctic-cold water collapsed over her face like an air-stealing cinderblock, pouring around her face and down her throat. A smack of pressure, similar to the feeling of being kicked in the diaphragm by her sensei, stole what air was left in her chest.

_Am I dying? _She silently screamed, frantically trying to pull herself out of the water's painful grip. It wasn't just the crushing or the absence of breath that seemed to be monotonously stealing her life, the sheer frigidity was weaving its choking hands around her neck. She expected her life to flash before her eyes or something dramatically closing like it did all the other times she had been thrown against death. Her mind just went completely blank with the exception of one sentence.

_I never got to tell Alé goodbye, o lo mucho que amba. _

That seemed to be what her life had become: half in English, half in Spanish, and completely revolving around her older brother's murder. But had those three aspects really consumed what was left of her?

And then it ended. Maria was yanked out of the watery abyss by her unbound hair. She sputtered and struggled for breath as she collided with the concrete floor. She looked around. Her vision was blurred, but it was clear enough to make out the surroundings. Three uniformed figures stood over her with small objects in their hands. The small, white room was otherwise empty save for a chair and a large vat of water with clumps of ice bobbing around the surface. With that, everything ceased to be surreal but became horribly concrete. The nightmarish aspect of the setting had drifted away along with any hope that she might be dreaming. Though still equally terror-filled, Maria's situation became dreadfully real.

"I suppose you would be willing to share with us the information we require concerning Colonel Franklin Clay and the remainder of his unit?" one of the figures asked with a chilling hint of confidence in his voice.

Maria had to choke on a mouthful of water, but she swiftly retorted, "Voy a hablar con tu cuando se aprende a hablar conmigo."

After a frustrated silence, Maria said, "It means no."

"Hmm, how interesting…" another one of them mused in mock fascination. "I wonder if your friend is of the same opinion."

Maria would have leapt up and snapped his neck on the spot, but she barely had the strength to heave herself to her knees. Cougar should have been in a hospital, not in some torture chamber! She wanted to kill someone. She wanted to grab someone's throat, smash someone's skull, tear at someone's flesh. All the tragic rage drained to make room for the raw, primal death lust that burned inside her heart. So many people had been taken from her in cold blood, and now her own veins were becoming pricked with venomous ice crystals. But when the guards hauled her toward the door, she shook her head.

_What's happening to me? _She wondered as they half-lead half-dragged her down the barely lit hallway. _I can't become like them. If I lose my humanity, everything will have been in vain. Jackie's devotion, Marcos's sacrifice, Alé's love, everything._

Something seemed to be missing from that, though…

_The team. All of them. Clay, Roque, Pooch, Aisha, Jensen, Cougar, and even Jolene. They are my family now. What's their devotion and sacrifice and love? _

Maria was thrown back into the same cell she had come from. The only noticeable changes were the puddle of water forming from her dripping clothing and Cougar's absence. She crawled to the back corner of the room, trying to ignore the screaming pain in her arms and legs, and curled into a ball in a futile attempt to preserve the last bits of warmth in her flesh. Maria felt unbearably vulnerable all alone with nothing but the agony that continually lashed on and under her skin.

_I am going to die here. _

No, that wasn't right either.

_We. We are going to die here._

As if on cue to her hopeless thoughts, the door cracked open. Maria subconsciously buried her face in her hands. Part of it may have been the fear of anyone seeing her so weak, or maybe the even more overpowering fear of seeing any member of her team more tortured then herself. Especially Cougar. He had been silently strong for her since she formally joined forces with the unit. But in Hell, everything changed with the cut of a knife, or a bash to the head, or a single, skin-penetrating needle filled with an unnamed poison…

"Te ves horrible," Cougar whispered faintly.

His unexpected voice made Maria flinch. How long had he been there? She saw the door open, but didn't hear or see anything after that. Again, she wondered how severe a toll Unit 16's torture was taking on her body.

"Así lo hace," she mumbled without lifting her head. She didn't want to see how terribly they had abused him. She didn't need to see to know.

"Tu parece triste."

If he she wasn't in such excruciating pain, she would have reached over and smacked him.

"Really?" she hissed. "My brother's dead, his murderer is still wreaking havoc around the world, I'm suffering more pain in one blink than I have in my entire life, and I'm watching my closest friend die. Why the fuck would that make me sad?"

"Sólo pretend que es un sueño. Ayuda a combatir el dolor."

The words barely registered in Maria's head, and it took a few minutes for them to compute. _Just pretend it is a dream. It helps to fight the pain. _Was that how Cougar tamed his past? Pretending everything that ever hurt him was nothing more than a memory that was created in a tormented sleep? And there he had been in the sunshine before Unit 16, laconic and soft spoken, where she had been agitated and keen. Who drew the line between dream and reality?

"Ven aquí," Cougar murmured.

Maria hesitantly peaked out from under her matted curtain of damp hair. He held one of his bloodied, trembling hands out to her. He looked as bad as she felt. His whole body glinted under a coat of either sweat or blood. A large gash ran down the diagonal of his back from shoulder to hip, accompanied by several lesser slashes wrapping around to his exposed chest. The left elbow joint was twisted in a way Maria knew that the human body was never supposed to bend. She couldn't see most of his from under his equally sweat-soaked hair, but she could catch a shimmer of blood streaming down his face like a tear. She gratefully clasped his outstretched hand.

"Les espera si tuve la fuerza," he rasped in a barely audible voice. "Yo te protegerá de todo."

"Cállate. Hush. Tu está delirante." Maria replied. They had probably injected him with so many drugs that he wouldn't be able to understand English if his life depended on it, as cliché and terribly ironic as it was. At the same time, she struggled to keep her languages straight. Those men had been so fond of needles. Who knew what was floating around in their veins?

"Tu debe dormer," Maria ordered, she herself ready to collapse in exhaustion.

Cougar grasped her hand tighter. His breathing was becoming shallow and rapid with every swallow for air.

"Puedes oír los cañones?" His voice was laced with sheer terror. "Puedes ver los fuegos?"

Maria began to panic. Whatever narcotic they had spilled into his bloodstream, it was giving him horrible hallucinations. He squeezed her hand tighter and tighter to the point where she could feel tears of pain well up in her eyes. She wanted to help! But she could barely hoist herself to one knee, much less save Cougar from whatever visions were plaguing him.

"It's gonna be okay. Todo va a estar bien." She spouted the words without thinking. _What am I doing? Am I really even talking? English? Spanish? Wait! Where am I?_

With blurring vision, Maria felt her hand fall out of Cougar's. She thought he was saying something, but she couldn't hear anything. An overwhelming flood of vertigo swept over her like the cold water from her torture and she didn't remember anything else.

_**The Losers**_

Clay waved two fingers over his throat and then in a one hundred thirty degree sweep in front of his face. Jensen nodded and passed the signal on to Pooch and Aisha. In five seconds, Roque, Clay, and Aisha would take down the armed soldiers guarding the entrance while Pooch and Jensen broke through the door. It was all guns-blazing from there. Taking a deep breath, Jensen clenched his fist around his pistol.

_Five…_

_Four…_

_Three…_

_Two…_

"One!"

Jensen smiled as he heard several muffled gunshots followed by weak grunts, but nothing else. That was his cue. Jumping over the corpses that the musclemen (and women) were kind enough to leave behind in place of breathing bodies, Jensen examined the door.

"What are we lookin' at J?" Pooch panted, out of breath from the excitement of beginning the long awaited rescue mission. The fear had melted off the unit about an hour prior when Jensen played his AC/DC, Journey, and Motley Crue, mix CD in the truck.

"Not much. All we need is a little C4 and we'll be in."

Jensen pulled out a small vial out of his jacket. Not exactly C4 but it would work. He pulled out the stopper and splattered it on the door. A little concoction he had made the night before would be sure to do the trick.

"Fire in the hole!" he shouted.

Just in time for the team to cover their ears, the double-bolted, safe-like door burst open in a small storm of shrapnel. Jensen let out an overjoyed whoop and high fived Pooch. Roque kicked down what was left of the barrier leading into the heart of the mountain. With Clay in the lead, the five descended into the labyrinth of empty hallways in full sprint.

"Do we have a map or something?" Aisha asked after a few minutes when the group came to a stop where three halls met, all of them lined with closed doors. There were no signs to mark where they were or where they could possibly need to go.

"Uh, guys," Pooch said, pushing open one of the doors. "You might want to see this…"

Jensen looked in over his shoulder.

"Holy shit…"

The room was filled with shelves, all crammed with bottles and vials of every shape, side, color, and label. Sitting in the center of the room was what appeared to be an operating table alongside a desk covered with open jars, injection needles, and newly sharpened scalpels still laying in tiny pools of blood. But it wasn't the gruesome operating tools or the overpowering chemical fumes that caught Jensen's attention. It was the pile of objects on the floor: three knives, twin pistols, a revolver, and a black cowboy hat.

Jensen snatched up the hat and lightly fingered the brim. There was no doubt that it was Cougar's. _I would hate to be the guy that tried to take this… _It should have filled him with dread that the hat was not on his best friend's head where it belonged, but it did exactly the opposite.

"They're here. They can't be far now," he said, genuinely optimistic that Cougar and Maria were alive.

"Is there a plan?" Roque asked while reloading the magazine of his semi-automatic sidearm.

Clay nodded.

"Kick down every door until we find them."

Everyone nodded in compliance. Jensen found it strange that no one had attacked them yet. All the doors they busted open were completely empty, except for the occasional operating table of swivel-chair. It was way too quiet for the most abusive prison in American history. There were no screams of agony, sadistic laughter, or even a tormented moan.

_Silent like the grave…_

"Hey! We've got something over here!" Pooch yelled quietly from a few yards down the hall. "This door is three inch thick steel and completely sealed. I'm guessing sound proofed."

"Then that must be a door worth opening," Aisha almost purred.

Jensen pulled another vial out of his pocket and ran it along the edges of the door. With a door this solid, it would take about a minute for the solution to combust. Each member of the team braced themselves for whatever terrible thing haunted behind the barrier of steel. Whether it was Cougar and Maria or some other unfortunate soul, it was bound to be a gruesome sight. Jensen blinked hard when his little potion did its magic. There was no light in the room and the hall lights were too dim to illuminate it, so the group strapped on a few headlamps. As beams of honey-yellow light flooded the room it took every ounce of effort in his body not to cry out in joy and horror. They had finally reached their friends, but in no better condition than they had feared.

Both of them were lying face down on the empty, concrete floor. Cougar was coated in sweat, but shivered violently, and repeatedly murmured something unidentifiable as Spanish or English. No doubt he was suffering a severe fever. Maria, however, lay in complete stillness. Jensen couldn't even tell if she was alive. He quickly dropped to one knee by her side and rolled her on her back. Her face was deathly pale with the exception of the nearly black circles around her eyes and the bloody bruises that ranged all over her body. He couldn't see her breathing, or feel a pulse on her wrist, but when he put his ear to her chest he let out a deep sigh as her heard her breathing.

"She's alive, but barely," Jensen concluded, focusing on Cougar.

The sniper seemed to be trapped in a state of nightmare. His eyes were screwed shut in the way a young child's did to skip a horror scene in a rated R movie they weren't supposed to be watching. Every couple of seconds his body would convulse violently. When Jensen barely touched his shoulder, his friend choked and sputtered out a thick mouthful of dark blood mixed with bile. Making sure that Aisha and Pooch were picking up Maria, Jensen pulled Cougar's trembling, blood-smeared body into his arms.

"Hey Cougs," Jensen whispered, brushing a large clump of hair out of his face. "It's me."

"Jensen… mi… amigo…" the battered soldier murmured in a voice just loud enough for Jensen to decipher.

Jensen let out a sigh of relief and a single tear rolled down his cheek.

"Yeah, buddy, it's me. You're gonna be okay, okay? We have you now. Maria is still alive and she's gonna be okay, I promise you that. She's gonna be okay because I know she loves you and wants to be with you. And I promised her that I would stay with you even if she wasn't, and that's because I love you. You are my best friend, Cougar! I have Madison, I have Ally, and I have you. And if that stays the same, then I'm gonna be okay. I know you can't understand me, but I promise you this: Everything is going to be okay. I even have your hat waiting for you."

**I'd say 'they all lived happily ever after,' but that just wouldn't be the Losers' fairytale ending.**

**TO BE CONTINUED! *but not if you people don't review!***

**Remember: add me to your AUTHORS watch list if you want to be alerted when the next story comes out. If you just add the story to your watch list, you WILL NOT be notified. **


	2. Spanish to English Translations

Spanish to English Translations for "One More Chance"

Voy a hablar con tu cuando se aprende a hablar conmigo – I'll talk to you when you learn to talk to me.

Te ves horrible – You look horrible

Así lo hace – So do you

Tu parece triste – You seem sad

Les espera si tuve la fuerza, Yo te protegerá de todo - I would save you if I had the strength, I would protect you from it all.

Tu está delirante. Tu debe dormer – You are delirious. You need to sleep

Puedes oír los cañones? Puedes ver los fuegos? – Can you hear the guns? Can you see the fire?

Todo va a estar bien – Everything is going to be fine.


End file.
